beached

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of beach.

   Rescuers found that the yacht had beached itself on a sandbar.

   Strong currents beached dozens of jellyfish along the coast.

   Note

   The regular past of a verb that works both ways. A boat can have beached on its own (intransitive), or a crew can have beached it (transitive), and the perfect takes have in either case. The verb also covers vehicles grounded on rough or soft ground until the wheels lose traction, so a truck beached on a ridge belongs here too. Used before a noun, the form becomes the adjective "run ashore".

2. 2
   adjective

   Run aground or hauled up onto the shore, out of the water.

   A beached rowboat lay tilted on the gravel below the cliff.

   The crew secured the beached vessel before the tide returned.

   Similargrounded, aground, stranded

   Oppositeafloat

   Note

   The neutral adjective made from the participle: it says only that something is out of the water, not whether by wreck or by design. Odysseus's ship, beside which the Achaeans of the Iliad hold their assemblies, sits on the shore as part of the camp. Robinson Jeffers's "long black serpents of beached seaweed" in Tamar (1924) were cast up by the sea. Helplessness belongs to the "stranded" sense.

3. 3
   adjective

   Stranded and unable to move or get help, especially when left on a beach.

   The beached whale could not work its way back into the surf.

   Once the funding dried up, the whole team was beached, with nothing left to do.

   Similarstranded, stuck

   Note

   Here the verb beach has become a state of helplessness. The whale is the classic case, but the image travels inland: Nadine Gordimer (1970) leaves a derelict car beached among trampled cassava, and Edmund White (1978) finds a woman beached on the floor outside her room. Unlike the plain "run ashore" sense, which only says where a boat ended up, this one stresses being stuck with no way to move on.

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